All 64 pillars complete

Post date: Nov 23, 2014 9:25:45 PM

On Friday, I finished the 64th pillar! It took two weeks, which was my expected goal according to my original timeline, which I have added to this website. I will now reflect on the process:

I liked the soldering iron at school better because of the flat shape of the tip; I was able to remove excess solder for a nice joint. At home, some of the joints are slightly more globby but all are high quality. I was expecting some of the solder joints to break when clipping so close to the joint, but as far as I know this didn't happen. The solder smoke was annoying but not bad enough to get a fan. I have made over fifteen hundred solder joints so far. My least favorite part was stringing the wires on the jig. I didn't mind soldering or clipping the extra wires. Putting the lights in was just tedious.

I am impressed with the strength of the jig. It didn't break, although it slightly bent under the tension of the wires. I expected more damage to the jig from melting plastic or broken super glue bonds, but they stayed strong and there are only a few melting marks, none which decrease the functionality of the jig.

I was afraid of running out of tinned copper wire, because I roughly calculated how much I would use by weight and I thought it would be a possibility to run out, but I have plenty left over which is good because I need it for connecting the pillars together. The time commitment for getting this far has been large but I expected and mentally prepared myself for it and I haven't lost motivation yet. In fact, finishing this first major milestone renews some motivation as I start to imagine how this is coming together.

Constructing the pillars became a routine. I almost always listened to music from Pandora while working. A few times I messed up the order of the routine when my mind was somewhere else, like snipping the wires before they were soldered to the lights, or completing a pillar that was missing a light. These mistakes can be seen on the side of the picture below. Overall, making the pillars went better than I expected. I calculated that I have worked well over twenty hours so far, and this is just the beginning. I have so much more to do before I am done. The next step is to test them all and then connect them into 8 rows of 8, then connect the rows into one big cube.

-Jeremy